This is an entry from our 2006 Holiday Gift Guide. Check it out for suggestions on what to buy your loved, liked, and hated ones this holiday season!

It looks like Sony may have learned from it’s mistakes based on it’s first foray into the personal navigation market and have come back swinging for a second round of competition with the NV-U71. What features did Sony throw into this one to make us so impressed? Well, for starters, the Sony NV-U71 has a nifty Gesture Command interface that allows you to make Plam Graffitti-ish type gestures with your finger or stylus right on the screen. Different gestures tell the GPS to do different things - for example, give it an upside-down V shape, and it will navigate your right back to your front door. No need to take your eyes off the road and go through pesky menus. Of course, it also is small and has a 3D map interface featuring a birds-eye view, but they all have that nowadays, don’t they?

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This is an entry from our 2006 Holiday Gift Guide. Check it out for suggestions on what to buy your loved, liked, and hated ones this holiday season!

In our opinion, it doesn’t get much better than the MacBook Pro when it comes to a portable computer. Why? Well, aside from the Intel Core 2 Duo processors that they house, they are lightweight and have batteries that last almost three hours under normal use and load. It has a built-in iSight webcam, FireWire 400 and 800 ports, and a backlit keyboard. The kicker here though, is that by using this with the Parallels software, you can run Windows 2000, XP, and Vista side-by-side within OS X. If you prefer a dedicated OS experience, you can use Boot Camp to run Windows on it’s own. That means that by buying a MacBook Pro, you get access to both the OS X and Windows operating systems with extreme ease. The same can’t be said for the PC side of things.

This is an entry from our 2006 Holiday Gift Guide. Check it out for suggestions on what to buy your loved, liked, and hated ones this holiday season!

The Sony PLAYSTATION 3 is build around the company’s much-hyped Cell processor, a 3.2-GHz chip that packs some serious processing power. The cell is what powers the PS3’s 1080p True HD output, alongside a 500-MHz nVidia graphics processor. The more expensive version also packs in WiFi, multimedia card readers, and silver trim. The SIXAXIS controller has a new input interface that is rotation and acceleration sensitive, allowing you to control games through movement (but without force-feedback.) Lastly, the PS3 has Blu-Ray built-in, so with the purchase you also get a high definition video player as well. Sure, at $600 USD it sounds expensive, but compare that to a $1000+ standalone Blu-Ray player, and the PS3 doesn’t look so bad after all.

This is an entry from our 2006 Holiday Gift Guide. Check it out for suggestions on what to buy your loved, liked, and hated ones this holiday season!

Here at Gear Live HQ, we are pretty keen on hard drive-based camcorders. If you aren’t shooting any major productions, these cameras are great in situations where a handheld camera is appropriate. The Sony DCR-SR1000 is a great tapeless camcorder, holding about 7.3 hours of high quality footage on it’s internal drive. You can change the quality of your recording in order to squeeze out over 20 hours of recording capacity from the camcorder. Low light performance is better than other cameras of similar size, as it sports a Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonnar T lens. It also have an onboard mic that records in four directions, allowing you to record in Dolby 5.1 surround sound. The only downside we could find to this one is that it’s a tad on the heavy side at 22.4 ounces.

This is an entry from our 2006 Holiday Gift Guide. Check it out for suggestions on what to buy your loved, liked, and hated ones this holiday season!

If you are looking for something different in the home stereo area, look no further than the Tivoli Audio Music System. This is an all-in-one solution that actually works - very well. The user interface is super-simple, and the buttons on the unit are exactly what they need to be. Nothing too advanced for anyone here. The Tivoli Audio Music System packs in an AM/FM tuner, CD player, and even an auxiliary input for your MP3 player of choice. The LED panel is perfect at 32 characters, and it even dims itself when you turn the lights off so as not to disturb your movie-watching (or sleep) experience. Our favorite feature? The SpacePhase setting, that makes audio sound even more clean and full - seriously, it rocks.

This is an entry from our 2006 Holiday Gift Guide. Check it out for suggestions on what to buy your loved, liked, and hated ones this holiday season!

With Wii, Nintendo seems to be poised to be the talk of the videogame town once again. Wii (pronounced “wee”) doesn’t match up to the PLAYSTATION 3 or Xbox 360 in terms of processing power, but makes up for it by boasting the best library of classic games on the planet, along with what many consider to be the most user-friendly controller ever to grace a home console. The Wii Remote (or Wiimote as it’s affectionately known) has a built-in accelerometer that works with a sensor bar that sits above or below your television. It senses movement and tilt in three dimensions, and even has a speaker for audible feedback directly out of the controller itself along with force feedback. Throw in built-in WiFi, and you have a console that is ready to download classic games from the 80s and 90s, as well as interacting with other Wii owners around the globe.

This is an entry from our 2006 Holiday Gift Guide. Check it out for suggestions on what to buy your loved, liked, and hated ones this holiday season!

Most foil shavers that we have tried aren’t that successful at shaving off longer facial hair. Not so with the Remington Titanium 5500. This shaver have a slide-out beard trimmer that cuts overgrown hair, which is followed by three foil blades. The third minifoil slides up, allowing it to be used as a mustache or jawline trimmer. This one is certainly recommended, as it is the best we have seen for cutting hair - and that’s what these things are all about, right?

This is an entry from our 2006 Holiday Gift Guide. Check it out for suggestions on what to buy your loved, liked, and hated ones this holiday season!

If you are looking for a full-fledged smartphone that lacks bulk, look the way of the Motorola Q. The Q packs in Bluetooth, a 1.3-megapoxel camera, and a QWERTY keyboard into a freaking thin 4.3 x 2.5 x 0.5-inch handset. The Motorola Q weighs just 4.1 ounces, so carrying this phone around is very comfy. The Q also sports a scroll wheel on the side, reminding us of the BlackBerry mainstay, and it works nicely on the Windows Mobile 5 OS. The screen is a 2.4-inch 320x240 display, but we wish the font size could be bumped down a few notches to fit more text without having to scroll. The Q can also do multimedia, which can be access on Verizon’s EV-DO network, or locally by packing your content onto a miniSD card.

This is an entry from our 2006 Holiday Gift Guide. Check it out for suggestions on what to buy your loved, liked, and hated ones this holiday season!

The 30D is an evolutionary upgrade from the EOS 20D and shares many of the same components/features such as the 8.19-megapixel CMOS sensor, shutter speed (1/8000), and autofocus system. New to the 30D is the 2.5” LCD with a greatly increased viewing angle as compared to the 1.8” LCD on the 20D. A deeper burst depth allows you to take more pictures in rapid succession before the camera writes to memory and is a welcome improvement when shooting in RAW mode. ISO speed is now adjustable while looking through the viewfinder and should make shooting with changing light conditions a much easier task.

This is an entry from our 2006 Holiday Gift Guide. Check it out for suggestions on what to buy your loved, liked, and hated ones this holiday season!

BlackBerry has gone mainstream with the BlackBerry Pearl 8100. Much more than a business-level messaging device, the Pearl 8100 packs in a 1.3-megapixel camera, vibrant 320x240 display, and MP3 support. The abridged QWERTY keypad allows you to type messages quicker than you would using standard T9, and also keeps the phone as thin as any other cell phone out there, with dimensions of 4.2 x 2 x 0.6-inches. The BlackBerry Pearl 8100 throws away the scroll wheel, and instead uses the Pearl-esque scroll ball in the center of the device. Throw in EDGE support, and you have a winner.